


Coming of age has come and gone

by Wishopenastar



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: AUTHOR AU, Alternate Universe, Angst, Anxiety Disorder, Identity Porn, M/M, Mutual Pining, Writers, canonical pet death, feelings about home
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-28
Updated: 2020-07-28
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:20:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25577206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wishopenastar/pseuds/Wishopenastar
Summary: This is for the lovely lovely Aze, it's s pleasure talking to you. You're beautiful and wonderful and I hope you're happy like you make me._..
Relationships: Katsuki Yuuri/Victor Nikiforov
Comments: 5
Kudos: 8





	Coming of age has come and gone

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Azraelyz](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Azraelyz/gifts).



> This is for the lovely lovely Aze, it's s pleasure talking to you. You're beautiful and wonderful and I hope you're happy like you make me.  
> _.  
> .

Yuuri lets the cloud covered sunset bathe him in quickly diminishing light. The metal of the railing digs into his lower thighs as he sits on it. He doesn't care about the smell of iron seeping into him or the small raindrops still falling on his hoodie.

It's been a weird day for him. Too many words running in his head and too many words wanting to escape from the tips of his fingers as he rode the plane and as he rode the train. Yuuri had tried to channel them into productivity, by writing out a picture he had in his head, testing it out to see if it could expand further. A person falling down beside a deep hole and watching as people climbed out of the hole one after the other as the person's knees kept giving out when they tried to stand. There's a dragon somewhere as well. It's odd, Yuuri is known for his short stories, but they never go into fantasy, firmly dwelling in the world he slightly understands.   
Write what you know is a flawed concept when somedays Yuuri feels like he doesn't know anything of the world or himself.  
Yuuri has given seven interviews and four of them were taken on pre-chosen questions. Yuuri had edited and edited his response until he knew exactly what he'd wanted to get out. The other three were probably disasters. But Minako says they weren't and Yuuri trusts her more than he trusts his brain on most days.

Coming home is supposed to be easy. It's supposed to be familiar sights and familiar faces and smells. But all Yuuri can see is the change. He's not set foot in Hasetsu proper, instead choosing to walk to the highest point of the town.

A raindrop drips on his glasses and Yuuri takes them off to wipe them. Hasetsu is pleasantly blurred, like his memories of it. Vague shapes he recognizes, the castle and the bookshop and in his memory blurred hands picking him up to set him on a table, Mari walking him to school.

He's tired, and his calves ache. But it's worth it, he thinks. It's worth it to be able to take it all in before he dives. Only Mari knows he's back home, she won't say a word though.

Yuuri itches for his laptop even though he'd himself packed it to the deepest part of his backpack before he had made the climb up.

The words have been kind to Yuuri. They flow, unlike the shoving Yuuri did before. Yuuri has stories upon stories now, even if most if them will never see the light of day again after he closes the word file. It's scary to be writing again, as scary as it's exhilarating.

Yuuri vividly remembers the day he had submitted his first collection of short stories to a publisher of the United States. It still surprises him that it was picked, that he got it published. That people read it.  
He knows it's easy to be drowned in the publishing industry. Drowned and forgotten, so when he's not, when his books make enough money for him to be self-sufficient even after a five year gap of not writing anything, it feels like a miracle.

Yuuri knows his publisher will want him back. Even though Yuuri had disappeared off the face of the earth after his three collection deal was published.

Yuuri puts his glasses back on as he thinks of what he wants to tell his family about his prolonged disappearance. They're the one group can never hide from. And he doesn't know if he wants to, but telling them where he was will be difficult because he himself doesn't know.

He was in China, France, all over the world. He doesn't know what he was doing there. But he knew that packing up and moving helped with the restlessness that overtook him, even as his words remained stubbornly withheld.

Yuuri had written poetry then. Except it felt exactly like what it was. Immature attempts at a new form.

Travelling had helped, immersing himself in cultures, meeting people who didn't know him had helped.

Yuuri knows exactly what went wrong after his last book came out. Vicchan died. He had been in Japan his entire life, he'd grown up with Vicchan but in the last few days of Vicchan's life, he'd been too involved in his life.  
The thing about pets dying is that it affects each person differently. Mari went into her coping strategies, she smoked again, her room always faintly smelled of cigarettes in the one month Yuuri had slowly gone mad in his home.

Yuuri himself had fallen into a pit. A day of self blame had turned into two, into three until a week had passed and Yuuri had moved on from blaming himself for Vicchan to blaming himself for himself.

It had sounded stupid to him, even as the tears had streaked down his face. It was stupid to feel unhappy over reasons that didn't exist, but Yuuri was probably stupid.

There was a solid reason why Yuuri trusted Minako more than his head. When almost three weeks had passed, she had come over to Yuutopia and showed a ticket to Paris and her old travelling suitcase at him, "It'll do you good." 

It did him good.

__

"I'm home!" Yuuri had discovered American country music in the travels, often the singers had crooned about never being able to go home again.

Yuuri doesn't know about never being able to go home again, but he does know about not fitting in your corner of home again. He knows that he's always welcome here, that his mother still keeps his room, but he also knows that he's outgrown that corner.

Or maybe not.

He still fits in his mother's arms the same way he had when he had left, Hiroko smells of onions and Yuuri's eyes tear up a little, it's too much when he himself is not using the same deodorant he'd used since he was fifteen.

Hiroko makes him stand a bit further and looks him up and down. Yuuri has paled a little after three summers in Europe, but he'd been in southern Asia for some time for the last few months so it's counter balanced.

"Have you been eating?" Hiroko asks as Yuuri prepares the apologies in his mind.

"Ma, I—"

"Come inside. Have dinner, you look tired. Then you can tell your stories." Hiroko leads him to the dining hall like she always used to.

There are very familiar bowls on the table. The same set his mother has used in the twenty two years Yuuri was home.   
Hotel plate sets are all different, they're heavy or light and each time Yuuri eats at a new establishment he tries to look for the individuality of the plates. He's missed home. It's evident in how a triangular chip with a crack running down in a restaurant bowl made him more happy than the publishing of his third book.

He had come home after that. And maybe stopping the travelling was a good idea, after all it had stopped being the only way he was sane and sometimes you have to own up to the truth and let go of comfortable, familiar lies.

He eats as the inn bustles around him. Mari walks by ruffling his hair like he's seven again and Yuuri leans into her hand as her touch leaves his hair. He'll have to talk to Mari later. After he actually tells his mother what was going on with him.

The conversation with his parents, it turns out, is not difficult in the way one might imagine it to be. Hiroko and Toshiya accept his absence's necessity without blinking an eye. It feels good to speak in his own dialect again. 

English is a good language for hiding behind, the way he needs to think before speaks hiding the worst of his emotions and impulses. It's become a thinner and thinner veil as he's become more proficiant but still. Japanese is him, unfiltered, home is him, vulnerable in front of his parents. Who don't look at him in the disappointment he's imagined in their eyes from the first day he's left.   
In the end, telling his parents about Thailand and his figure skater friend there, Russia and a signed book he'd found there, USA and the way it's so in the face while being so unreachable; is like any other story he's told his family. Except this one is real.   
Yuuri visits Vicchan, named after Victor Nikiforov, the reclusive author and Yuuri's first real crush. The shrine smells of incense that Yuuri lights, he has always felt mildly suffocated by its smell. It always reminds him of death but Vicchan deserves the respect it shows. Yuuri is mildly dizzy by the time he stops speaking to his dog and just starting to wonder if Vicchan himself hates the smell of incense. 

The moon is up in the sky and its light filers through. Yuuri can smell cigarette smoke mixing with the burnt out incense, "You never stopped?"  
Starting the first proper face to face conversation they'd have was supposed to be good. A hug, a how've been. But this is how siblings are, "I've drastically cut down if it helps."  
It does.   
"Is my coming back home something to warrant them?"  
"I literally have one a day. I figured if we were going to talk in here, I might just take today's."  
"You don't come here?" Yuuri asks, bht he knows the answer.  
"Sometimes."  
"Sometimes?"  
"Sometimes... I do, come here that is." The cigarette smoke trails up. Yuuri watches Mari walk to the door and open it.   
He follows her there and lets his head rest in her shoulder like it so often had when they were children.   
He falls asleep like that.

**Author's Note:**

> This chapter arose of my need for more Yuuri exploring his home and his relationships with it. Vitya was supposed to come in but...¯\\_〳 •̀ o •́ 〵_/¯ at feelings about home  
> _  
> This fic comes from my need for more authors aus. It's definitely not a self insert but Yuuri's anxiety is mine.  
> _  
> Title from Swift and Folklore Because I'm obnoxious and in love with the album.  
> _  
> Please comment/kudo and feed my shriveled soul.


End file.
